How meth can destroy your life – even if you’ve never touched it

Deepak Chohan, left, with Sean Barrett with his girlfriend Ruth. Dr Chohan once asked Barrett whether he thought he’d win the Nobel Prize and he said ‘yeah, why not?’ ‘It wasn’t in an arrogant way; he was just that smart,’ she says.
AFR

Antony Fogarty has been awake for a week. He is ­driving fast. Very fast. He must escape. The police pursuit car that had attached itself to his bumper has pulled back. He is still being chased. A police helicopter is overhead.

The 23-year-old tenses his right foot and the Toyota FJ Cruiser four-wheel-drive responds. The red hand of the speedometer rises. The Toyota slithers down Orrong Road: a major arterial thoroughfare that congests every weekday afternoon, as cars and trucks hustle, bustle and bump south-east, away from Perth’s business district to the city’s light industrial precincts. It is ­night-time. The only congestion is being caused by a police booze bus for random breath-testing. Fogarty doesn’t stop. The police aren’t fast enough to respond.

Fogarty tenses his foot again. The speedometer inflates to 167km/h. He is not tired. Methamphetamines, injected straight into his veins, are pulsating around his body. He is invincible. A major intersection looms. His lights are off. The traffic lights are red. Fogarty doesn’t respond. A taxi pulls out into his line of sight and it stops, as if it has sensed something is coming towards it – something dangerous – and doesn’t know which way to flee.

Cancer conquered

At 12.20am, Sean Barrett has his seatbelt buckled in economy as Qantas Flight 78 descends into Perth, en route from Singapore. The 36-year-old British physicist from Imperial College, London, is in Australia at the invitation of his friend and research colleague, Tom Stace. Both had done their PhDs at the University of Cambridge, England, in theoretical physics. Stace now works in the school of mathematics and physics at the University of Queensland, where Barrett did a six-month stint in 2005-06.

At his friend’s invitation, Barrett has prepared a talk for a physics conference on quantum simulation, one of the practical applications of the mind-bending theory of quantum mechanics.

Related Quotes

Company Profile

Antony Fogarty, driver of the stolen 4WD. By his early 20s, Fogarty’s drug habit had hardened through almost a decade of use.
AFR

He has arrived on a Friday morning, so he has a few days to get over his jet lag before the conference starts on Monday, on Rottnest Island, about 18 kilometres off the Perth coast. Barrett might also have time to go for a run on the banks of Perth’s Swan River, part of a fitness habit he has adopted to combat the often sedentary working hours of a researcher.

He’s not a gifted athlete but he has completed several charity runs and swims, including events for the British Heart Foundation. Sean’s father, who died several years ago, suffered from heart disease.

To make it to the conference, Barrett has turned down an invitation to Buckingham Palace. Along with a select group of outstanding UK scientists, he would have dined with, and presented research to, government ministers on the potential of quantum mechanics, when applied to computing.

Barrett had quipped to his mother, Jan, before leaving London that his Perth commitment meant he got to “stand up" Buckingham Palace.

“The reason [Kuldeep Singh] worked nights was that during the day he could be there in case his wife needed him,” says Suresh Rajan, a vocal advocate for ethnic communities in Perth.
AFR

Just months before, the young scientist had been cleared of cancer. During his treatment, he remained dedicated to supervising his own PhD students. He knew his life could be cut short, and therefore he was going to pass on as much knowledge to his students as possible – while there was still time.

The cancer had one other important impact. Two of the doctors who were treating Sean were graduates of Imperial College and their conversations soon turned to the unreliability of medical imaging: the crucial process of “seeing" inside the body in order to diagnose and treat a problem. Barrett set himself the task of improving that process, and so he started studying microbiology.

At 12.45am, QF 78 arrives at Perth International Airport; the physicist can expect to be at his city hotel room by 2am, and, hopefully, get some sleep before meeting up with Stace later that day.

Acute intoxication

Deepak Chohan, a long-time friend of Sean Barrett’s, at home in Ultimo.
Photo: Louise Kennerley

One of the paradoxes of methamphetamine use is that it rarely kills the user, like, for example, heroin. Methamphetamine can kill the user through suicide or homicide but, commonly, an innocent bystander – often an unsuspecting driver in the wrong place, wrong time – dies through the user’s actions. Heroin users kill themselves; methamphetamine users kill others.

In the hours leading up to Friday morning, October 19, Fogarty had smoked cannabis and taken methamphetamines. It was a habit he had adopted at age 13.

Methamphetamines have a variety of street names, although the term “speed" is the fitting catch-all term. Big crystals of methamphetamine only form when it is very pure and that is what is called “crystal meth", “shards" or “ice". Methamphetamine can be smoked, swallowed and, in the case of hardened users like Fogarty, injected.

Yet, for a drug that is enjoying a renaissance of historic proportions, most Australians are blissfully unaware of its reach into our society, and most vulnerable generation.

The facts are often the same: a young person, who is lonely, depressed or anxious is introduced to methamphetamine by a friend. The drug increases the amount of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain, which is linked to the experience of reward, motivation and pleasure.

The new user likes how they feel.

“Methamphetamine will not make you happy and relaxed. It will make you excited, tense and very pleased with yourself – for a while," says Professor David Joyce, head of clinical pharmacology and toxicology at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in Perth.

“That is acute intoxication. It is called acute because it arrives quickly and later disappears. As the hours pass, the excitement and pleasure fade to tiredness and low mood. That is the payback."

There is always payback.

Occasional users battle through this phase, but the temptation is to escape it by repeating the dose. The user starts to need methamphetamine like food and drink.

The primary drug of choice of people entering Odyssey House, an alcohol and drug rehabilitation service headquartered in the Sydney suburb of Redfern, is methamphetamine. At Odyssey House, it has outstripped even alcohol. About half a million Australians have used methamphetamines in the past year.

As a percentage of the population, according to Nicole Lee, associate professor at the National Centre for Education and Training on Addiction at Flinders University, Australia has a user rate three to five times higher than in North America and the United Kingdom.

“For a central nervous stimulant like methamphetamine, it may be because initially it gives them a great lift," says Odyssey House chief executive James Pitts. “These are people who may have been depressed or have anxiety and don’t feel like they can interact with other people. It’s like, ‘hey, I found my soul mate.’ "

Fabulous intuition

There is a stereotype that theoretical physicists are formal and impersonal. That does not describe Sean Duncan Barrett. One of his favourite pastimes was to sit with his friends with a pint of beer at the end of the day and discuss things important and trivial. He appreciated music of all kinds: jazz, classical, opera. He loved art and cricket in equal measure. He hated unfairness, especially unfairness in opportunity of education. He went to a state school. He won his place at Cambridge. What better place to focus his energies on, than a field of study – quantum computation – that promises to unimaginably change the world?

“He was working in one of the most interesting areas of modern physics and making an important contribution to that field," says Stace, who used to take Barrett to his uncle’s macadamia farm near the northern NSW town of Jiggi.

“He was one of those sorts of people that others would seek out his thoughts and advice on research problems – even if he wasn’t working specifically on that problem. He had a huge general knowledge and fabulous intuition for physics problems. It’s fair to say lots of people’s research benefited from his intellect."

Quantum computers are much more than faster versions of the digital computers we all use: they would be capable of solving problems that are beyond the reach of any conceivable digital supercomputer. Comparing your laptop to a quantum computer would be like comparing a Ferrari to a Saturn rocket. One is advanced, the other is astronomical.

The full potential of quantum computing is far from understood, but it is not a fictional realm. There are already working prototypes in research labs here and abroad. Among its potential uses, there is hope that the process of discovering new medicines – that can take chemists and pharmacologists years of patient research and experimentation – could be fast-tracked by a quantum computer able to simulate how new ­molecules will behave in the human body.

Early suicide attempt

He walks outside the airport terminal, looks for a cab and sees a white Swan Taxi station wagon. It is just after half past one.

Across town, the police helicopter spots its target, crossing a bridge over Perth’s Canning River. It is 1.36am. Earlier in the evening, police had tried to flag down a vehicle, a Toyota FJ Cruiser four-wheel-drive that had been stolen days earlier. Unknown to the police, the driver, Fogarty, did not steal the car. He had “bought" it in exchange for methamphetamine. He has been spotted on several occasions this night. Each time, the police activated their emergency lights and sirens. Each time, Fogarty sped off.

With a helicopter now tracking his every move, though, the police know exactly where he is. A chase car is dispatched. It is not the first time Fogarty has tried to escape.

Antony Edwards Fogarty tried to hang himself when he was 10, not long after the death of his cousin, a close childhood friend. Fogarty was hospitalised by the suicide attempt, and has been in and out of mental health services ever since. He was raised by his mother and grandmother in Perth’s Armadale region – an improving area then known for its high crime rates and youth unemployment – and he can’t recall meeting his father until age nine.

Four years later, a friend introduced Fogarty to marijuana. He quickly moved on to methamphetamine, using it to block out unpleasant thoughts and manage stress. He has never liked stress.

He had his first brush with the law at age 15, which was about the same age he left school. By 18, Fogarty was well known to the police, mainly over drugs and theft used to pay for his drug habit. He had fled police on at least two occasions as a juvenile. At times, Fogarty lived on the streets. He attended various programs and received counselling but he never paid much attention. Turning up to a counselling session was just a way to avoid going into juvenile detention.

“One of the unfortunate things about the juvenile justice system is that there’s just not that many services for kids," says Odyssey House’s Pitts, who has been working in the sector for almost 25 years.

Why?

“There’s no votes in it. Consequently there are very few programs. Most of the time they just get locked up. If anything, that makes them more hostile and they get into more trouble. I’ve been fighting for more funding for … I don’t know how long."

By his early 20s, Fogarty’s drug habit had hardened through almost a decade of use. He was an intravenous user, where the dose is higher and the effects immediate. The dosage increased in proportion to the scale of his life’s failings. When he separated from his partner in May 2012 – the mother of four of his children – the dosage increased.

When the Department for Child Protection threatened to put the four kids into foster care – he has five children from two relationships – the dosage increased. He put the kids into the care of his mother, Faye, to avoid the state intervening. He was injecting more methamphetamine more often.

No empathy

Methamphetamine users make lousy drivers.

The fine line between confidence, anger, paranoia and aggression – all normal user experiences – is easily crossed at the slightest provocation. Or perceived provocation. Some users will not retreat from confrontation, even if they understand it will be to their own detriment. You can’t reason with a meth user.

They have no empathy. A pedestrian and inanimate object on the sidewalk, such as a light post, have equal worth. Or, to be more accurate, they are both without worth. This is why drivers on meth who have just killed someone can immediately pick up their mobile phone and talk to a friend, without regard for what has just occurred.

“They are not psychotic; they have an intact understanding," says Joyce, who also works for the University of Western Australia. “They understand the consequences; they are just indifferent to them."

It is clear drug-drivers are dangerous during a high. But they are also dangerous on the way down, given methamphetamine drivers have a habit of falling asleep at the wheel.

In June 2012, an 18-year-old user who hadn’t slept for three days drifted into the path of an oncoming cement truck in the northern Perth suburb of Whiteman. The truck hit a third vehicle. The occupant was killed instantly, leaving behind a husband and kids. The drug-driver climbed a barbed wire fence and fled. He was later arrested.

Over a six-year period in Victoria, methamphetamine was the most detected drug among the 5000 people caught by roadside drug tests. When one of WA’s most seasoned traffic cops, Inspector Neil Royle, retired in March, he told Fairfax’s WAtoday that nine out of 10 police pursuits now involved traffickers, dealers or offenders high on drugs.

“Once upon a time we used to get involved in police chases because a guy didn’t have his licence or was drunk. Now, it’s because they’ve got methamphetamines on board and they want to get away," he said.

WA Police declined a request to comment for this story.

Nobel Prize in his sights

It’s 1:40am. Barrett gets into the front seat of the taxi and converses with the driver, Indian-born Kuldeep Singh. Singh, a Sikh from the Punjab region of northern India where Sikhism originated, was now living permanently in Perth.

Even if he had wanted to, Barrett couldn’t have pre-booked a rental car to pick him up at the airport. He could drive a tractor but he’d never got around to getting his driving permit. When he went on a road trip to Byron Bay, his long-time friend, Dr Deepak Chohan, had to do all the driving.

“He was down to earth and yet at the same time a genius," says Chohan, an emergency registrar. She met Barrett studying at Cambridge and now works at Concord Hospital in Sydney; a city where Barrett lived in 2009 while working at Macquarie University.

“I remember once I said to him, ‘Do you think you’ll win the Nobel Prize?’ and he said ‘Yeah, why not?’ It wasn’t in an arrogant way; he was just that smart," Chohan says.

As Barrett and Singh start on their anticipated 20-minute journey from the airport to the city, there’s a lot to talk about. Barrett, an avid cricket fan, had always tried to co-ordinate his trips to Australia with an Ashes Test. This time, England was about to face India in a test series on the subcontinent.

Twenty-eight-year-old Kuldeep Singh had grown up in India. In 2006, he went to Melbourne, where he spent three years completing studies in hospitality. He qualified for permanent residency and moved to Perth. Singh was a hard-worker. There was no sick pay in some of his casual driving jobs and so he turned up to work. He always turned up to work. It was especially important to earn a few more dollars now, given Singh’s wife, Harpreet, was heavily pregnant – Singh was about to become a father.

“The reason he worked nights was that during the day he could be there in case his wife needed him," says Suresh Rajan, a vocal advocate for ethnic communities in Perth.

Singh, an only son, was also helping support his sister, Parwinder Kaur, who was living with Singh’s family and studying nursing in Perth. He was helping support his parents in India. He was supporting his grandfather.

Singh’s parents weren’t overly wealthy; their son was their primary investment. The expectation was heavy, but Singh had broad shoulders. He also had a voice that could break out into song at the mere mention of Bollywood.

Meth fills the gap

If a society is to be measured on how it treats its weakest members – in this case, drug-addicted youth – then Australia is at risk of failing that great test. For every decision not to intervene, forcefully, into the life of a new meth user, there is payback for all of society.

Always payback.

“These kids need help," says Chohan, reflecting on the young people she sees go through emergency wards. “They are physically able, their potential would be so high, but they are just not given the help early enough. Is it any surprise they turn out the way that they do?

“There will be a child with a terrible upbringing. You try and get them to an adolescent mental health unit and there are no beds. And then we are surprised they turn out the way they do."

Up until 2005, most treatment programs in Australia were designed to combat the primary addictive drug of choice, which was heroin. That started to shift after heroin’s availability diminished, primarily as a result of the war in Afghanistan. Heroin became harder to come by every time the United States encouraged an Afghan opium poppy farmer – opium contains morphine which can be processed into heroin – to convert land to cater for more nutritious crops, such as corn.

Methamphetamine filled the gap in the drug market. Criminal bikie gangs soon ramped up their involvement in its manufacture and distribution, with profit margins thought to be as high as 80 per cent. In 2010, Australian consumers spent $7.1 billion on illicit drugs, according to analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics data by not-for-profit group Anex. The methamphetamines/amphetamines category was the second single biggest part of the drug market (after cannabis), accounting for $1.5 billion.

There are three types of substances used in illicit drug manufacture; precursors, ­reagents and solvents. Pseudoephedrine is a precursor, or starting material, for the manufacture of methamphetamine. This means meth cooks are always keen to get their gloves on pseudo-filled cold and flu tablets. In 2004, law enforcement agencies estimated that about 90 per cent of pseudoephedrine used in clandestine laboratories was sourced from pharmacies.

The problem for authorities is that clan labs aren’t easily identifiable; they don’t generally resemble the large, sophisticated labs depicted in television series like Breaking Bad. Rather, speed can be produced in the boot of a car, or a small outside shed. Anywhere, really.The common method of production in WA is called the “Nazi-method". This involves a process of “birch" reduction – named after Australian organic chemist Arthur Birch – of pseudoephedrine to create methylamphetamine .

The manufacturing process often involves ammonia, which is very corrosive. As Melissa Davies, who works in the illicit drugs section of Perth-based forensic science lab ChemCentre, puts it: “It can pretty much burn your lungs away."Meth cooks are not known for splurging on the best equipment. Ammonia is often kept in BBQ cylinders that have plastic fittings which are easily corroded. Gas, which is, of course, highly flammable, is often used in the process of cooling ammonia gas. It is no surprise that clan labs sometimes go boom.

User profile

Davies says that clan labs in WA are typically designed for either home-bake heroin or methamphetamine; but meth labs are definitely more common. Samples sent to ChemCentre for testing, usually from a police bust, show that the purity of methamphetamine is increasing. The average purity in 2009-10 was 26 per cent. At last count, it was 48 per cent. “It does imply that it is getting stronger," Davies says.

Policy-makers have long struggled to find a solution. A 1972 inquiry into drug use by the Canadian government contained the following, disturbing note: “No drug problem elicits such universal pessimism among those concerned with treatment as the task of reclaiming a chronic speed user."

National drug surveys show that a typical user is young and male. There’s also evidence to suggest that those in stressful occupations – including finance and media – are particularly susceptible. Intriguingly, there have been recent reports that methamphetamine has become to overworked North Koreans what coffee is to Australians – part of many people’s daily routine.

While methamphetamine use is not the drug of choice for any particular socio-economic group, those lacking financial resources find it easier to fall into its grasp, and harder to climb out of it.

In Australia, policy-makers have targeted drug-making materials, such as pseudo­ephedrine. This is why you need to present photo identification when buying cold and flu tablets with the amphetamine precursor in it. That policy, which was introduced in 2006, helped stall methamphetamine’s encroachment into Australian life – a fact reflected in the 2010 national drug household survey report.

But supply and demand market forces intervened. Authorities started seeing increased meth shipments from south-east Asia. Specifically, source countries such as Burma, Thailand and China found Australians were willing buyers. Australia’s proximity to Asia helps explain why user rates are so much higher here than in most other parts of the developed world. Almost all experts agree that the next drug household survey report, due out this year, will show a distinct increase in methamphetamine use countrywide.

Increasingly unfair odds

Singh and Barrett chat as the taxi meanders through the almost vacant streets that lead away from the airport. There’s nothing much to look at: a few light-industrial warehouses selling machinery, buses and caravans.

Singh takes a left-hand off-ramp in preparation to do a right-hand turn onto Orrong Road, en route to the city.

The right-hand arrow is green, and so the taxi maintains its speed as it starts into a right-hand turn. Singh senses something to his right. A runaway car, with no headlights on, is almost upon him. Singh squeezes the brakes.

The Toyota flashes its lights. FLICK. FLICK. FLICK.

Singh urges his taxi into reverse. The 4WD veers in the same direction. Barrett looks on. Helpless.

Singh brakes. He wills the taxi forward. It starts to move.

The Toyota has over-corrected, and now it is ­starting to skid. At him.

At 100km/h, it would take about 46 metres for a good quality car equipped with an anti-lock braking system to stop. At close to 170km/h, you would need 134 metres of space, according to Dr Shane Richardson, of Melbourne-based Delta-V Experts, a forensic engineering consultancy.

As speed increases, so does the distance a car travels while the brain is processing information. The average time it takes for most drivers to react to a risky situation on the road is 1.5 seconds. “Typically, people who run red lights aren’t going slow," says Richardson. “They typically hit the side of the other vehicle and it doesn’t end well for the other vehicle."

That is, drug-drivers often survive a crash they cause while their victims don’t. When a drug-driver hits another car in the side, the perpetrator is protected by a 1.5 metre crumple zone. They also have their seat behind them, cushioning the blow. The victim of a T-bone crash has about 20 centimetres of steel protection on the side of their car. Their hips might be fixed in by a lap belt, but their head, neck and spine are exposed. The same goes for passengers.

The odds are increasingly unfair when the perpetrator is driving a hulking four-wheel-drive.

Kerry Hoggett, an emergency physician at Royal Perth Hospital, says car crashes are not the only reason methamphetamine users end up in the emergency ward. Some can go into a state of “agitated delirium", their thought processes scrambled.

“We see people who have been picked up by an ambulance because they have been acting erratically, like running down the street naked," says Hoggett.

David Joyce says, for regular users, life’s priorities reorder themselves and methamphetamines are elevated to the top. The workings of the mind change. Trust, stable mood, self-control and co-operation give way to suspicion, flighty mood, anger and unreliability. Relationships fail. Employment becomes problematic. And criminality – often to pay for the drug – follows. For some, there is severe psychiatric illness.

It’s a strain on medical staff. An unstable person, liable to do anything, at any moment, might require several hospital security guards to pin him down. There will also be a police presence. The user will need a constant companion during treatment.

Other meth users self- present with chest pain caused by a drug-induced heart attack. There are those who have tried methamphetamine for the first time who end up with brain damage and need to learn to walk and talk again. Such occurrences always increase during the music festival season.

“We need a multi-disciplined response," says Hoggett. “It includes a change in society’s opinion; there’s still a strongly held belief that one won’t hurt or that occasional use isn’t a problem. There’s this concept of having to overdose to have a problem, but most of the problems are from people using the drug exactly as intended and sold."

Authorities are grappling with the societal cost, which goes beyond the financial burden to the healthcare system. In a 12-month period in Victoria, there were more than 3200 methamphetamine-related assaults and almost 4000 burglaries.

At one stage during his teens, Fogarty briefly controlled his habit. He attended a youth-focused centre near his childhood home on Perth’s south-eastern fringe. It was the type of place where organisers teach kids about things they like – automotive skills, music, art – and shoehorn them into counselling.

Australia will always need treatment centres for hardened users, but what about appropriate resourcing to intervene earlier? Matt Noffs, grandson of Ted Noffs, who set up what was probably the first drug crisis centre in Australia in the 1960s, uses the following analogy.

Imagine a deep, dark chasm. Some alcohol and illicit drug users have fallen into it, and groups, including the Noffs Foundation and Odyssey House, offer treatment centres to help get them out. But others, often young people, have just taken a step or two into the chasm. Or perhaps they are just walking dangerously close to it. They are not yet engulfed.

Enter the modern-day drop-in centre. The Noffs Foundation’s Street University program is headquartered in a converted warehouse in Sydney’s south-west. It invites young people in the Liverpool area, normally aged up to about 25, into workshops ranging from filming and street art to break-dancing and sound engineering. Young people get a vision of a better future than what alcohol and illicit drugs can offer.

Getting governments to commit to long-term funding to these sorts of programs is like trying to grasp smoke.

“I wish we could just click our fingers and be around the whole country. We’d look to have a treatment centre and street university in every state," says Noffs. “But we are one of the least sexy charities out there; people don’t want to acknowledge the problem."

It’s financially tempting for governments to cut into programs designed to keep early offenders out of juvenile and adult detention and in intensive treatment programs instead. These aren’t cheap, costing taxpayers several hundred thousand dollars a year, per person.

Shortly after the Newman government took control of Queensland’s debt-laden accounts, the conservative government cut straight into diversionary programs. But what is the longer-term financial cost?

University of NSW researchers did the maths in a 2013 report. The report, backed by accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, found that various intensive intervention programs designed for people suffering from mental health disorders – which often included drug disorders – was money well spent. They found that for every dollar spent on the programs, between $1.40 and $2.40 in government cost was saved in the longer term.

At 1:50am on October 19, 2012, just 65 minutes after Sean Barrett had stepped onto Australian soil, Fogarty struck the driver’s side middle of Singh’s taxi with enough force to change the taxi’s direction and push it 45 metres down Orrong Road.

Singh and Barrett were killed instantly.

Those in the police helicopter saw the taxi burst into flames.

Fogarty fell out of his door, screaming about pain in his legs. He told the first people to arrive on the scene that he was not the driver, and that somebody else had been in the car.

Antony Fogarty is wearing a blue-grey prison uniform with dark trim. He has the lightest of brown eyes. He rests his right hand on the table, palm up, displaying a tattoo with his nickname, Fogs, scrawled down his forearm. He is more confident, and appears to have more purpose, than the Antony Fogarty who sat before a sentencing judge on February 14 to receive the news he would spend up to 11 years in prison.

The visitor’s area at Perth’s Hakea Prison is sparse but pleasant. There is a colourful corner, prepared especially for children visiting their dads. The youngest visitors don’t know why their dads can’t come home with them. Fogarty gets regular visits from his kids, aged two and up.

His typical day starts at 7:15, when he wakes. He has a shower, then prepares for room inspection. He eats breakfast and goes outside for a period of morning exercise. Some of the inmates play basketball, but he walks only a few laps of the grounds, because of pain in his legs and lower back.

Fogarty says he got a hard time when he arrived in prison: he was the “monster" who killed two people. He repeatedly refers to the crash as an accident, and says he only thought of one thing in the early hours of that fateful morning – escape.

How did meth help him deal with life’s adversities? “It didn’t help, but after speed and three bongs, well, it dulls the pain. I injected meth because that way, it goes straight into the bloodstream."

Fogarty blames his initial plea of innocence as a result of concussion, before his “memory and conscience kicked in". He doesn’t mention that authorities also taped his phone calls during his initial custody, and they caught him admitting to friends and family he was the driver.

He has asked his family to keep every newspaper article written about him so that, when he gets out, he can have a record of how far he has come. He says he would like to use his story to help steer kids away from methamphetamine.

He has also mapped out several years of study plans, that include gaining a number of trade skills, and his driver’s licence, which he has never held. He will be eligible for parole in October 2021, when his eldest child will be about 15. He talks about his kids in the same way any normal, natural, proud father does. He says he dreams of going fishing with them.

Fogarty says he is truly sorry. “You know, it was an accident," he says, eyes staring, head shaking. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. That’s not me. I’ve lost people close to me, I know that pain. I never wanted to cause anyone else that sort of pain."

Three weeks after the crash, Harpreet Singh gave birth to a healthy baby girl. She will be raised in Perth, as per Kuldeep’s wishes. Kuldeep’s father Bhupinda travelled to Perth immediately after hearing the news about his son. Hands shaking, eyes watering, he told Fairfax’s 6PR radio station in Perth that it was “unbearable" having to go to the hospital to see his son’s body. “He was the only son," he said, through a translator. “Without him there is nothing for us."

After Fogarty was sentenced, Kuldeep’s friend, Jessica Ickeringill, says that Harpreet wanted her husband to be remembered as a “loving friend" about to be a father. “Harpreet just wants to be left alone," Ickeringill says. “It’s going to be hard now. Their daughter is going to grow up without a father."

A couple of weeks before the crash, Sean and his mother Jan went to Liverpool to see an exhibition featuring JMW Turner, Claude Monet and Cy Twombly. It was the main area of mutual interest the mother, an art teacher, and son could discuss on an equal footing. Jan once feared those days were nearing an end, when Sean told her he had cancer. She thought then that was the worst possible news a mother could receive.

“Sean had a wonderful wry, dry sense of humour," says Jan Barrett, who told the sentencing judge she was blindsided by a quiet devastation; that Sean was “the heart of my life, the life of my heart".

She tells AFR Weekend: “He was extremely good at ad-libbing, and had a funny answer for almost every question. It was a joy to be in his company, to hear his huge laugh."

Sean ran a breakfast club for his students every Wednesday morning. Staff also attended. He would ask daft questions, says his mother, that others were too self-conscious to ask, and surprise every one with his quick grasp of very abstruse questions.

“In his short life he lived the equivalent of three lives of an ordinary person," she says. “And interacting with people was his great joy. I have a feeling that when he and his taxi-driver were hit by that criminal in his stolen car, they were probably ­dis­cussing cricket."